Importance In Taxonomy For Large Websites

Summary

Voices of Search Podcast: Episode Summary
Episode Title: Importance In Taxonomy For Large Websites
Release Date: February 25, 2025
Host: Tyson Stockton
Guest: Alex Silverberg, President and SEO Strategist at AP SEO

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1. Introduction

In this episode of Voices of Search, host Tyson Stockton engages in an insightful discussion with Alex Silverberg, President and SEO Strategist at AP SEO. Building upon their previous conversation about optimizing for Search Generative Experience (SGE), they delve into the critical role of taxonomy in managing large websites.

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2. Understanding Taxonomy in SEO

Tyson Stockton introduces the topic by highlighting taxonomy as a fundamental aspect of site architecture:

“Taxonomy is just another word for site architecture. It's how you organize your site. [...] it is something that's super important for SEO, but honestly, it affects all parts of your business, especially if you're a large website.”
— Alex Silverberg [03:33]

Alex Silverberg elaborates that taxonomy is essential not only for SEO but also for overall marketing and user experience. Proper organization ensures that both users and search engines can navigate and understand the site's content effectively.

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3. Good vs. Bad Taxonomy

The conversation shifts to distinguishing between effective and ineffective taxonomy:

Alex Silverberg explains the consequences of poor taxonomy:

“Without proper taxonomy, users are going to have a very frustrating time navigating your site and it's possible that they're going to miss your most important pages. [...] It's going to not be a good thing.”
— Alex Silverberg [04:48]

In contrast, good taxonomy facilitates:

• User Navigation: Users can effortlessly find what they're looking for, enhancing their experience and increasing conversion rates.
• Search Engine Understanding: Search engines can comprehend the relationships between pages, improving indexing and ranking.

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4. Taxonomy and Topical Authority

Tyson Stockton connects taxonomy to the concept of topical authority, emphasizing its significance in large websites:

“You're able to link out and to push that value of your expertise to other pages that are related to that. [...] You're building off of that.”
— Alex Silverberg [05:39]

Alex Silverberg provides an example using an e-commerce apparel website to illustrate how hierarchical taxonomy can establish and reinforce topical authority. By organizing content into related categories and subcategories, the site demonstrates expertise across various apparel segments, enhancing its authority in the eyes of both users and search engines.

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5. Implementing Taxonomy: URL Structure and Breadcrumbs

The discussion delves into practical implementation strategies:

URL Structure:

Alex Silverberg underscores the importance of a logical URL structure:

“The men's jeans page, the slug would look something like /apparel/mens-clothing/jeans. So what this is going to do for you is it's going to help the search engines discover and relate all the paths of this folder.”
— Alex Silverberg [07:42]

A well-organized URL hierarchy aids search engines in understanding the site's structure and the relationships between different sections.

Breadcrumbs:

Breadcrumbs serve as an additional signal for both users and search engines:

“So you kind of have two signals to the machine, like, hey, all these pages are related and all these pages are good and they all have topical authority.”
— Alex Silverberg [07:37]

Implementing breadcrumbs enhances navigation, allowing users to easily traverse the site while reinforcing the site's taxonomy for search engines.

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6. Navigation and Internal Linking

Tyson Stockton and Alex Silverberg discuss the balance between comprehensive navigation and user experience:

Avoiding Navigation Overload:

“One of the main issues I've seen with a lot of sites is they want to overstuff the navigation. [...] trying to make it as comprehensive as possible. But if you do that, you're really providing a bad site experience.”
— Alex Silverberg [10:20]

Instead of cluttering the navigation menu with every category, focus on prioritizing the most important sections. Utilize internal linking strategies to incorporate less prominent pages elsewhere on the site.

Internal Linking Strategies:

Alex suggests leveraging various site elements to reinforce taxonomy:

“Think about the low performing categories that still generate some revenue but are not as important as your bigger pages, right? [...] just writing a description there and linking to the appropriate categories within that.”
— Alex Silverberg [10:20]

By integrating links within content, carousels, and image slides, SEOs can maintain a clean navigation menu while ensuring comprehensive site coverage and SEO benefits.

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7. Scaling SEO with Proper Taxonomy

Tyson Stockton emphasizes the scalability benefits of a well-structured taxonomy:

“With a proper taxonomy and structure to the site, then you're really able to scale, whether it's internal linking or a lot of other practices.”
— Tyson Stockton [12:13]

Alex Silverberg concurs, positioning taxonomy alongside user experience, design, and speed as top priorities for website development:

“Your taxonomy should be one of your top three considerations when building your website outside of user experience.”
— Alex Silverberg [13:10]

A solid taxonomy foundation allows SEO strategies to be efficiently scaled, particularly important for large websites with extensive content.

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8. Addressing Poor Taxonomy

When dealing with existing poor taxonomy, Alex Silverberg advises leveraging sitemaps:

XML Sitemaps:

“Submit XML sitemaps of all of your pages, products, whatever it is, by different categories, create these individual sitemaps.”
— Alex Silverberg [14:00]

XML sitemaps help monitor how search engines index site content and identify areas needing improvement.

HTML Sitemaps:

“Utilizing HTML sitemaps to link to pages not found on default landing pages or navigation is a great tip.”
— Alex Silverberg [14:30]

HTML sitemaps serve as an additional layer of internal linking, ensuring that even less prominent pages are discoverable by both users and search engines.

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9. Conclusion and Final Takeaways

Alex Silverberg wraps up with actionable advice for SEOs facing taxonomy challenges:

“A de facto HTML sitemap which can look from everything from like a hub and spoke page to a blog post or new landing pages. [...] really, it's up to you how you want this to look.”
— Alex Silverberg [15:10]

Key Takeaways:

• Prioritize Taxonomy: As a cornerstone of site architecture, taxonomy should be a primary focus during website development and maintenance.
• Logical URL Structures: Organize URLs hierarchically to reflect the site's taxonomy, aiding both user navigation and search engine understanding.
• Effective Breadcrumbs: Implement breadcrumbs to reinforce site structure and improve user experience.
• Balanced Navigation: Avoid cluttering navigation menus; use internal linking to cover less prominent pages.
• Utilize Sitemaps: Leverage XML and HTML sitemaps to monitor and enhance site taxonomy, especially during migrations or restructurings.
• Scalability: A robust taxonomy facilitates scalable SEO practices, essential for large websites.

Tyson concludes by expressing gratitude to Alex for his valuable insights, encouraging listeners to connect with him through provided channels.

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Transcript

[Tyson Stockton]

The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Tyson Stockton.

Hey, what's going on? My name is Tyson Stockton from Pre Visible IO and joining me today is Alex Silverberg, friend of the podcast and also President and SEO strategist at AP SEO. With a decade of industry experience serving B2B B2C E commerce websites, AP SEO's mission is to empower business owners to make more informed decisions about their digital marketing future. Yesterday, Alex and I talked about how to optimize for sge, and today we're going to continue the conversation by discussing the importance in taxonomy for large website. All right, here's my conversation with Alex Silverberg, SEO Strategist and President at AP SEO. Alex, welcome back.

[Alex Silverberg]

Thanks for having me again. Happy to talk SEO with you again. I really enjoyed our conversation last time. So happy to dive in.

[Tyson Stockton]

Yeah, it's always, always good to talk shop with you. I feel like you left the listeners with a bunch of great advice and tips. So if anyone didn't check out the previous episode, go ahead and check the previous episode in whatever you're listening to this on. But today I feel like we have, at least for me, I'm really in. I mean, it is an SEO podcast, so I think for a lot of listeners out there, an interesting topic. You're calling out the importance of taxonomy for large websites and without even knowing the content that we're going to get into. I'm already excited for you to call out kind of this because I think this is such a key area for large websites. But maybe for the listeners out there, whether, you know, maybe they haven't done SEO at the enterprise level on a large website, or maybe, you know, they're just kind of settling into a new role, like working on it. How would you communicate or kind of describe why taxonomy is so critical at the enterprise level or at in any large website?

[Alex Silverberg]

Yeah, and I think this is a really important topic for us to discuss, not only for SEO, but marketing as a whole, because taxonomy is just another word for site architecture. It's how you organize your site. And you notice that I didn't have any SEO buzzwords in there or anything. And it is something that's super important for SEO, but honestly, it affects all parts of your business, especially if you're a large website. So it's really, really important for you to think about this very deeply. Not too deeply, where you kind of run yourself in circles, but really think about your product catalog and what you're offering and how do you organize that? How does it make sense for the user and also the search engines? And how do you just want to categorize your site? What do you want the experience to be of someone just navigating and trying to find what they're looking for?

[Tyson Stockton]

Absolutely. And what would be some common elements of good taxonomy versus bad taxonomy?

[Alex Silverberg]

That's a great question. So let's think about what happens when you don't have good taxonomy. Without proper taxonomy, users are going to have a very frustrating time navigating your site and it's possible that they're going to miss your most important pages. It's not going to be a good experience for them. And at the end of the day, it's probably not going to be a good experience for the search engines as well. Similarly, if your taxonomy isn't organized properly, it's possible to that you're going to miss the full value from the search engines on that. It's going to miss important relationships between your pages and the users are probably not going to be able to find what they're looking for and that's going to be not good for anyone. You're not going to hit your sales goals, you're not going to hit your leads goals. It's just going to not be a good thing. But when taxonomy makes sense, people are able to find what they're looking for. They're able to convert the way they want to convert. The search engines are able to understand the relationship between your pages. They're able to understand why you put something here and why you put something there. They're able to attribute value between these pages. There's a lot of things that are very helpful for search as well as users when you do have proper taxonomy.

[Tyson Stockton]

Absolutely. Now, I feel like in the positives or like the good examples, you kind of hit on some elements around what your website's about. And I assume with this we're referencing kind of topical authority. And I feel like this is a really critical element in the large websites, being that one, there's probably a variety of topics that you're, you know, needing to show your expertise on. But I think, like, the connection, interaction between pages and how each page is not necessarily operating in isolation is a really significant factor. So maybe if you could just elaborate a little bit more on how taxonomy can play into this concept of topical authority.

[Alex Silverberg]

Sure. And I agree, topical authority is not something we talk about enough in the SEO space. I think we talk a lot about good content and quality content and stuff like that, but it's all tying into topical authority. How authoritative are you on a specific subject? How can that extrapolate throughout your site? And that's where taxonomy helps. Let's take an example of an E commerce website. Let's say you have an apparel landing page and you are talking all about the products you sell. You say, hey, I have this, I have this, I have that. I sell shoes, I sell hats, I sell shirts. And you're talking about your manufacturing process, you're talking about your materials that you use and everything like that. That is showing that you know what you're talking about in terms of apparel. And this is probably a quality product that people want to buy. Now let's say that page just lived on its own. That's cool. That's fine. I think it's going to be helpful. But because this is your apparel landing page, right. You're able to link out and to push that value of your expertise to other pages that are related to that. So let's take the example of like women's clothing. You could have a woman's clothing landing page from there. Right. Or a men's clothing landing page. And then you could talk about women's clothing and men's clothing, the same level of expertise and information that you would on that apparel landing page. From there, you could talk about men's jeans or women's jeans, same thing. And all these pages are related to each other. So it's kind of funneling all that great information and that great value from that apparel page. And you're building off of that, Right. You're going to other pages within that and you're showing like, hey, not only do I sell great apparel, but I sell great men's clothing, I sell great men's jeans, and all these things are related. And the machine can see that with good taxonomy, with certain elements that you put in there. So I'd love to talk about what that looks like and how you can really put taxonomy to work within that.

[Tyson Stockton]

Let's do it like I'm on board. What is, what does it look like?

[Alex Silverberg]

So, yeah, let's follow the example, let's continue on this clothing website here. So the first step I'd have is really make sure your text auditing makes sense. Right. Your men's jeans page is not going to be living within the women's clothing landing page, stuff like that. So let's talk about URL structure. URL structure is a really great way to implement our taxonomy here in having optimized folder structure within your slugs. Right. So let's talk about those. That men's jeans page, the slog would look something like slash apparel, slash men's clothing, slash jeans. So what this is going to do for you is it's going to help the search engines discover and relate all the paths of this folder. Your general apparel page, which we have the example from before, very much built out, very much has topical authority. The men's clothing page also built out and then the men's jeans page. This proper taxonomy helps all these pages get discovered just by the URL and helps pass that value in between that. So that's really cool. So yeah, you definitely have that value through the URL structure and the slugs here too. But not only that, you can really reinforce this by breadcrumbs on all these pages too. Right. So you kind of have two signals to the machine, like, hey, all these pages are related and all these pages are good and they all have topical authority. So for that example I have there, the breadcrumb link would look something like home carat apparel carat men's clothing on the jeans page. And what the machine's gonna do is it's gonna continue to crawl those links between that, it's gonna understand the relationship and you're also gonna provide the user a place where they could find what they're looking for and kind of go back and forth.

[Tyson Stockton]

Absolutely. And again, you hit on a lot of key components here. Like one, you're illustrating out how a proper taxonomy can help facilitate for like stronger topical authority. You're creating easy paths for the user. You're also creating those additional crawl paths, ensuring you know that all the pages least desired pages are being indexed accordingly. And you also were giving kind of the additional follow through on how having the breadcrumbs, which obviously the breadcrumbs, you're again to your point painting more of like the structure of the website for search engines, but you're also adding those additional links to those other pages. Tell me a little bit more about linking. And also, you know, how does like the navigation menu play into this?

[Alex Silverberg]

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think something that's super, super important for taxonomy for a large website because you're going to have a ton of pages, they're not all going to make it to the navigation, nor would I recommend they all make it to the navigation. One of the main issues I've seen with a lot of sites is they want to overstuff the navigation. They think that this is the only place the user is going to look. This is the only place the machine is going to look for these links and just try to make it as comprehensive as possible. But if you do that, you're really providing a bad site experience. If your site is large enough, right, For a smaller site it may be all right. But if you have a lot of products, it's going to look overwhelming and it's going to seem a little spammy, to be honest with you. So in drawing up your navigation, you may be tempted to put any and all of the site's taxonomy there for users and search engines. But it's really important to know that if it's not there, you could put it elsewhere on the site. And that's where we get into some of these internal linking, right? So think about the low performing categories that still generate some revenue but are not as important as your bigger pages, right? Try to think about how can you internally link these on your more important pages? Are they related? Does it provide context to these pages? So going back to our apparel example, maybe we don't have women's hats on the navigation, right? But we have it on our apparel landing page or a women's clothing landing page that provides a place for the user to find the link and for the search engines to find the link as well. At the end of the day, you really want to key in on your most important categories and pages and be sure that that is present on your navigation. Anything that you really are not including there. Those are candidates for increased internal linking, not only through site elements like carousels and image slides, but also things like in the content itself, just writing a description there and linking to the appropriate categories within that.

[Tyson Stockton]

And across all of this, I feel like one of the big takeaways that I would have or like points that I would want to emphasize with this is you're really unlocking a lot of the opportunity at scale within a large website. Like you're never going to be able to just manually, you know, have internal links to every single page and doing like kind of one offs from it. But I think the big takeaway from this is with a proper taxonomy and structure to the site, then you're really able to scale, whether it's internal linking or a lot of other practices. So I feel like this for the, for the SEOs out there is like one of the key concepts to really dive into and lean into hard for operating SEO at scale.

[Alex Silverberg]

Exactly. Your taxonomy should be one of your top three considerations when building your website outside of user experience. Design, slash, speed like this is such an important element because quite frankly, it's how users are going to experience your site and it's how the search engines are going to view your site as well. It's very, very difficult to come back from a bad taxonomy without redoing it completely. But there are some things you could do if your taxonomy is a little wonky.

[Tyson Stockton]

Absolutely. Any other final thoughts that you'd want to leave with the listeners?

[Alex Silverberg]

Sure, let's, let's follow up on that point. Let's say your taxonomy is not good, for lack of a better term. Right. This is a very common scenario for a lot of SEOs that are maybe hired within an organization that's a little more old school, that's coming from a E commerce print catalog background, right. Where it's just kind of old school taxonomy where search was not considered here. And from here I want to tell the SEOs, leverage your sitemaps. It's going to be very important. It's going to give you a lot of good information. And by that I mean both your XML sitemaps and your HTML sitemaps. So make sure you submit XML sitemaps of all of your pages, products, whatever it is, by different categories, create these individual sitemaps. That way you can see what Google's doing with these products. It can let you know of like, hey, because of my taxonomy, it's not really finding any of this stuff and maybe I need to work more on internal linking or something like that. Past that, utilizing HTML sitemaps to link to pages not found on default landing pages or navigation is a great tip. I've also seen this be very effective with website migrations, right. Where we want to really push the URLs that aren't being found or something like that. And what this can do is it can provide you a tool to follow up on the XML sitemap information, right? So if, for example, you have an XML site map for your women's hats like we have before, and you see that none of these products are being picked up, it may make sense to create a de facto HTML sitemap which can look from everything from like a hub and spoke page to a blog post or new landing pages. Really, it's up to you how you want this to look. What makes it an HTML sitemap is ensuring that all the links are on that page and they can be found that are going to reinforce your taxonomy and help the machine understand what your site is doing a little bit better.

[Tyson Stockton]

Excellent. Those are some key gems for all the listeners out there. Alex, greatly appreciate the time and the insights that you've been sharing with the listeners. I hope we get the opportunity to have you back on the podcast and share some more insights with the listeners. But with that, that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Alex Silverberg, SEO Strategist and President at AP SEO, for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with Alex, give him a shout. His LinkedIn profile is in our show notes. Or you can also contact him on Twitter where his handle is Lexander Silverberg. Or go on over and visit his company's website at apseo Co.

[Ben Schapp]

Okay, thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is TysonStockton. Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O Just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is benjschapp B E N J S H A P and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed. We're going to publish an episode every day during the work week, so hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.